Charlotte Dacre

Charlotte Dacre (1771 or 1772 – 7 November 1825), born Charlotte King, was an English author of Gothic novels. Most references today are given as Charlotte Dacre, but she first wrote under the pseudonym "Rosa Matilda" and later adopted a second pseudonym to confuse her critics. She became Charlotte Byrne upon her marriage to Nicholas Byrne in 1815.

Life
Dacre was one of three legitimate children of John King, born Jacob Rey (c. 1753–1824), a Jewish moneylender of Portuguese Sephardic origin, who was also a blackmailer and a radical political writer well known in London society. Her father divorced her mother, Sarah King (née Lara), under Jewish law in 1784, before setting up home with the dowager Countess of Lanesborough. Dacre had a sister named Sophia, also a writer, and a brother named Charles.

Charlotte Dacre married Nicholas Byrne, a widower, on 1 July 1815. She already had three children with him: William Pitt Byrne (born 1806), Charles (born 1807) and Mary (born 1809). He was an editor and future partner of London's The Morning Post newspaper where the author Mary Robinson was the poetry editor and an influence on a young Charlotte Dacre, who began her writing career by contributing poems to the Morning Post under the pseudonym "Rosa Matilda."

She died on 7 November 1825, in Lancaster Place, London, after a long and painful illness.

Work
In 1798 Charlotte King published with her sister Sophia a volume of Gothic verses, Trifles of Helicon, and dedicated it to her bankrupt father to show 'the education you have afforded us has not been totally lost'. She used some of the poems from Trifles of Helicon in Hours of Solitude (1805), published under the pseudonym Charlotte Dacre, which confirms the identity between Dacre and King. She wrote verses for the Morning Post and Morning Herald under the name Rosa Matilda. Also in 1805 she published The Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer, a Gothic tale of sexual repression and misbehaviour. In the preface Dacre claims the book was written at the age of eighteen and left untouched for three years during journeys abroad. She wrote a total of four novels: The Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer (1805), Zofloya, or the Moor (1806), The Libertine (1807), and The Passions (1811).

Of her four major novels, Zofloya, or the Moor is the most well-known and sold well on its release in 1806. It has been translated into German and French. The novel follows the corruption of the strong and sexually ruthless heroine Victoria, and her gradual enslavement to the charismatic Moorish servant Zofloya (later revealed to be Satan).

Influence
In the literary world, Charlotte Dacre has remained in virtual obscurity for nearly two centuries. Yet her work was admired by some of the literary giants of her day and her novels influenced Percy Bysshe Shelley, who thought highly of her style and creative skills. She is believed to be one of the numerous targets of Lord Byron's satirical poem English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, mentioned in the lines:
 * Far be't from me unkindly to upbraid
 * The lovely 's prose in masquerade,
 * Whose strains, the faithful echoes of her mind,
 * Leave wondering comprehension far behind.

Partial bibliography

 * Trifles of Helicon, with her sister Sophia King
 * Hours of Solitude (Poems) (1805)
 * Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer (1805)
 * Zofloya (1806)
 * The Libertine (1807)
 * The Passions (1811)
 * George the Fourth, a Poem (1822)